Agile Teams & Octopart: The Future of Hardware Development

In this episode of the CTRL+Listen podcast, host James sits down with Justin Sears, Head of Product Marketing for SaaS at Altium, to explore how Octopart and Altium are converging into a unified, end-to-end hardware development platform. Justin breaks down how up-to-date parts data from Octopart is being embedded directly into Altium's design environment, helping procurement managers, PCB designers, and system engineers work smarter in the face of COVID-era supply chain shocks and ongoing tariff disruptions.

Justin walks through Altium's Agile Teams solution, BOM Portal, and Octocart — powerful tools that allow hardware teams to shift procurement work earlier in the design cycle, compare distributor pricing at the click of a button, and stay ahead of part availability changes without ever leaving their design environment. Whether you're a seasoned Altium user or exploring it for the first time, this conversation shows why the latest data and cloud collaboration are now essential for competitive hardware development.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Justin
• Learn More About Agile Teams

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Key Takeaways

• Supply chain volatility has become a design-time concern, not just a procurement issue, forcing teams to monitor component availability and pricing much earlier in the product lifecycle.
• Up-to-date data visibility enables faster, better decisions, allowing teams to react in days instead of weeks when availability, cost, or geopolitical factors change.
• Cross-functional collaboration is increasingly critical, especially for globally distributed teams where engineering, procurement, and manufacturing must work in parallel rather than sequentially.
• Shifting work left improves efficiency and resilience, as procurement and system-level considerations start earlier, reducing rework and late-stage surprises as designs evolve.

Transcript

James Sweetlove: Hey, everyone. This is James with the Ctrl+ Listen podcast, brought to you by Octopart. Today, we're doing something a little different from what we usually do. We're going to have an internal guest. This is Justin Sears. He is the Head of Product Marketing for SaaS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's really good to have you.

Justin Sears: It's my pleasure to be here, James. Looking forward to it.

James Sweetlove: Anytime. So I want to start. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into all the details of the show?

Justin Sears: Yes, of course. I've been doing enterprise software marketing in my career since the year 2000, so that's 26 years now, with a couple of breaks in between. I've mostly focused on data storage and data analytics in my career in terms of the software stacks that I position as a marketer. And I've moved more toward end-user applications later in my career, which I find to be much more interesting as a marketer.

James Sweetlove: That sounds like it. And then what brought you to Octopart?

Justin Sears: I came to Octopart. I'm at Altium, and of course Octopart is part of Altium, and I came to Altium because I had a friend who went there and encouraged me to come over, and I had moved more into the manufacturing space and electronics, so it was a really good segue in my career.

James Sweetlove: Makes total sense. So do you want to tell us a little bit about the background of Octopart and where it sits in the larger company?

Justin Sears: Yes. Most people don't know this, but Octopart was actually originally created by end users, I believe. I don't know their names, but they were doctoral students, and they were in electrical engineering, and they were just trying to find parts and things that they wanted to build into whatever they were working on. And they couldn't find an easy way to look up parts, so they built it, and they found other people to use it. I don't know how many years ago that was, but it's been several now, and they sort of accidentally founded a company as part of their doctoral research.

James Sweetlove: Okay, awesome. And then how did that come to be part of Altium?

Justin Sears: Well, Altium, of course, has been in this business since the late 1980s, mostly on the PCB design side. Now, you can imagine the synergy that exists between people who are designing PCB boards, or PCBs, and finding parts to put on those PCBs. And so I think this is before my time joining Altium, but I want to say about 10 years ago, Octopart was acquired by Altium. Now, Octopart, of course, shows chips from a lot of different OEMs and distributors, and so for a period of time, I think Altium management wanted to make sure that the Octopart brand was kept very separate from the Altium brand so no one thought there would be any monkey business going on. I think folks have realized that we have that confidence now, and so we are starting to talk about Octopart as being part of Altium in a much more public way than we used to.

James Sweetlove: Sure. So how does that collaboration work between the two brands? You said we're starting to see more collaboration in that space. What does that mean?

Justin Sears: Well, at Altium, we're really building an end-to-end platform for designing and delivering electronics. And of course, a big part of that is supply chain procurement, placing parts on designs that eventually get turned into hardware. And so what we are doing is really combining those two in the product. For example, in Altium, we have a capability called BOM Portal, where the procurement manager can manage their bill of materials for all of the PCBs that they have under design or prototype. You can imagine if the company gets to a certain size and they're running multiple projects, you might have 10 projects going on, 10 BOMs, and those BOMs will share some of the same chips. So what's important for that person managing the process is that if the availability, the price, or the end-of-life status of those parts changes, you just want to see it in your design environment. You don't have to go out and look it up and continuously refresh that information. And so we're finding ways to really take the extraordinarily large amount of data that's in Octopart about parts and the status of parts and integrate that into the design environment in Altium so people can just see updates rather than having to go out and look for information as part of their active designs.

James Sweetlove: Makes total sense. Let's take a step back for a second. So maybe we can talk about some of the current issues that we're facing in the market. Obviously, that's going to tie into why we're doing this, so I'd love to hear from you what you think those major issues are.

Justin Sears: Well, there are two that have been in the news for about five years. Issue number one: COVID and the shock to the supply chain that it caused when shipping took a huge decline. And then, of course, more recently, the tariffs that have come into place and some of the tariff friction that has come up as part of policy. And so the interesting thing, and we can see this actually in the aggregate Octopart data, is people stocked up during COVID. They got a lot of parts and warehoused them because they wanted to protect themselves from part availability issues. And then when COVID started to abate, they drew down those inventories of parts right around the same time that the U.S. administration started imposing tariffs. So designers, developers, and producers of electronics went from a place of having large inventories and drawing those down to suddenly worrying again about having enough parts on time to design. So it's been a little bit of a whiplash for the customers that we serve. But of course, Octopart provides visibility. What you want in those situations of turmoil, whether it's COVID or tariffs, is to know as much about the parts that you plan on using as early and frequently as possible so you can stay ahead of any changes to availability and to the supply chain.

James Sweetlove: Right, so you're planning, not reacting.

Justin Sears: That's right. Or reacting in a day rather than in a month. So, either one. You can be reactive or proactive, but both of those require data, and accurate data.

James Sweetlove: Definitely. So, both platforms, from what I understand, have been facing some similar challenges on either side of the production side of things. Do you want to elaborate a little bit about what that's been looking like for both companies?

Justin Sears: So, Altium or Octopart?

James Sweetlove: Yeah, so how does that overlap with the needs of those people and the challenges they're facing?

Justin Sears: Well, I look after the team that looks after marketing for Octopart, and also the team that looks after marketing for Altium. So, we plan and have been executing large changes in the product for Altium. So, for anyone who's listening who's familiar, we were built on Altium Designer, which is a local on-prem software product. And more recently, we introduced a series of applications for Altium 365 that were cloud-based. And we are in the process of merging those two into two platforms, so if you look at our website, you'll see Agile Teams, you'll see Altium Develop. All of those solutions involve both Altium Designer, which is on-prem, and Altium 365, which is the cloud connectivity around that, which really powers the collaboration that we're talking about. So, since I just mentioned collaboration, what Altium is doing, in terms of companies that we're acquiring and new product development that we're doing, is going beyond our core audience of PCB designers or electrical engineers into all of the other people who have to work with those folks to get hardware designed and developed. So those are your procurement people, which we're talking about today. They're also your system engineers, the people that manage requirements. They're your mechanical engineers who need to make sure the board fits in the device that you're creating, your manufacturing engineers. All these different people and folks who have worked in this industry know who those other people are, or those other roles are. We're making sure that all of those people can work together in one shared cloud workspace, and that really helps. One of the impacts of recent turmoil, whether it's COVID, supply chain issues, or tariffs, is much larger for globally distributed organizations that have offices on multiple continents, because those people need to work together. Now, if you're all in one building and all in the same time zone, it's a little bit easier to collaborate. But most of the midsize and large companies that we target do things in different parts of the world at different times of the day, and so that end-to-end platform that Altium is developing really allows that agility and that 24/7 responsiveness to what happens. Now, I'll tie that all back to Octopart. Data, data, data. We want to provide our customers with the flexibility to design to their heart's content and whatever their imagination can come up with. That means we don't know, and they don't know, ahead of time which parts they're going to need, how many they're going to need, and when they're going to need them. That's where integrating Octopart and those data signals into the Altium platform can provide that flexibility and agility that the hardware development team needs to be as fast and creative as they need to be in this competitive environment.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, that's fantastic. So, data is really the best part of this collaboration. Everyone can see. Previously they had to use two completely different platforms and work separately. Now you have something in unison that allows easy use for both parties.

Justin Sears: That's right. And a great example of that is we have a utility called Octocart. So what you can do in your BOM, in your BOM management within Altium, we have customers, of course, that have BOMs that have thousands and thousands of parts. It's time-prohibitive to constantly be checking those parts manually. So with the data feed from Octocart, and we also work with other third-party data providers such as Z2Data and SiliconExpert, that's constantly feeding into those BOMs. When you're ready to go and price that BOM, our customers may have arrangements with certain distributors, they may have their own price list, or they want to go out to the market and find which distributors have the best price. Because the BOM is within Altium, you can really press a button and then it will go out to some of those major distributors and come back and give the BOM manager, or the procurement person, costed BOMs, different costs for different providers, and they can mix and match. So that's really going to help with cost optimization. It's a big part of that job role. You want to improve the margin of whatever hardware you're developing by reducing the cost of components while maintaining the quality that you need. And again, that comes back to data and being able to go out to the marketplace in a couple of seconds and really say, “Here's the thing I want to build. Tell me how much it's going to cost me in terms of components,” and getting signals back on three or four options for how to proceed. That's extraordinarily powerful for people who need to make those decisions.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, and I think they're operating right now where efficiency is the name of the game. Time-saving is so important. That's where the money really comes in, because everyone has access to technology, but it's where you can really save time, save effort, and streamline operations where people really benefit. That's my opinion, at least.

Justin Sears: Well, that's true. And Agile Teams is one of our newer solutions, and really what Agile Teams is meant to do, if you think about how this has happened, the system engineer that wants to build a drone, let's take the example of a drone, the system engineer wants to build the drone. Part of that drone is a PCB, but there are other parts of it. So the system engineer makes the requirements, and then they pass them along to the PCB designer to design the board for that prototype for that product. Then they wait, and they pass that board along to the procurement person who needs to cost the components for that board. Now, what would happen, James, if you could shift everything left? So, rather than the procurement person waiting until the PCB designer is completely finished and then starting on day zero when it gets handed off, what if that procurement person could look upstream and see even weeks before they're ready to make a purchase? “What type of chips are they designing on that drone? What are the types of things I'm going to need to procure?” They can start their work early. And again, that gets back to agility, but also, like you mentioned, efficiency. It's going to be much quicker work if they can start that process earlier than they used to. And that's what we allow with this cloud collaboration that we enable in Agile Teams. You shift that to the left so people can start their work early, as you might say, and not complete it until it's their time, but they can start the work earlier, and that's going to help efficiency.

James Sweetlove: I think it's not just that. When you're looking at procurement, it's amazing to be able to know way ahead of time, as you're starting to design, what's available and what might become unavailable, so you can easily adapt and make changes early in design cycles so that you're not wasting time there as well.

Justin Sears: Yeah, and also, things change. So you might make a decision about what parts you want in the BOM, and you think it's done, and then maybe it goes to the mechanical engineer and that board doesn't fit in the enclosure, and you have less leeway than you thought you did originally, and that changes. Well, you have to go back and look sometimes. You have to go back and look and make sure that all of the parts that you originally intended to use are going to give you enough clearance. That's one specific example. So it's not just getting to the work earlier. It's being agile and nimble and being able to adjust as things change. Things change during the lifecycle of a project. You need to always adapt. Until the thing rolls off the line and is in physical form, things can change, and you want to be able to adapt and adjust as they do.

James Sweetlove: Right. Just to change topics really quickly, I remember you told me before this call that you were actually looking for groups of users who can benefit from shifting things to Altium. So, did you want to elaborate on what you were discussing there?

Justin Sears: Yes, we are. We've been in this business for a while, and we have a lot of customers that have been with us for 15 or 20 years. We also know that, as we expand what we offer, we're expanding into supply chain and into security capabilities, and we're needing to talk with IT folks. So our audiences are expanding, and what that means is we also have the opportunity to expand into different channels that serve those audiences. And of course, we know our EEs and our PCB designers very, very well, because we've been serving them for 20-plus years. Some of these other folks that are involved in the hardware development process, we as a company are newer to talking to those people at scale. Now, individual procurement people, of course, have been along for the ride since the late 1980s when Altium was formed, but now we're scaling up our offerings for those different groups, and that means that we want to learn. So, of course, the easiest and best way to learn about what we have to offer is to get a trial of our solution. And so you can go to our website, and we have Altium Develop, which is for the smaller, less sophisticated organizations. And we have Altium Agile Teams, which is for more of a midsize, a little bit more complex development process. Both of those solutions allow a 30-day free trial, and all you have to do is go to our website and sign up. That's a great way to start the conversation, because if we're talking to somebody who maybe has never used Altium, or maybe they haven't used Altium for 10 years, coming back in and trying what we have now and engaging with the experts that we have on our end to help people be successful in that trial process, that's the fastest and most efficient way to learn about what we have to offer, and also see, “As a professional in hardware development, am I using the best tool or platform that I could be using?” We believe, with all the changes and improvements we've made to the product and the packaging, that a lot of people should give us a second look and see what we have to offer.

James Sweetlove: And we'll have those links included in the description of the video. So, if anyone's curious, we'll have that available for you. Just check the video description.

Justin Sears: Thirty-day free trial, no credit card. Just go in, try it, and we'll be along for the ride to help you understand what you're seeing.

James Sweetlove: Fantastic. So, is there anything that people should be looking forward to, or excited about, coming soon?

Justin Sears: Well, just last week, and you were there with me, we were at DesignCon in Santa Clara. That was a fantastic show. We always have old friends, people who have been customers of ours for decades, come up and ask what's new. And we have people who are brand new, a lot of young people who are getting into the industry for the first time and want to learn about Altium. So that was a great show in the United States. I will be getting on a plane Sunday evening and going to Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, and of course that is a massive show with a lot of folks in the aerospace, automotive, and other sectors visiting with us there. And we are talking about Octopart. We have been speaking for about a year about a new solution that involves Octopart, and at Embedded World next week, we'll be making more announcements about that. So, if anyone's listening to us and they're planning on going to that show, or they're going to be in or around Nuremberg next week, you should come by and check it out. We're making some big announcements about that next week.

James Sweetlove: Fantastic. Just to tie things up nicely, do you want to tell us how to get in touch? What's the best way to actually reach out if you want to speak to a sales rep about Altium Agile specifically?

Justin Sears: Yeah, just go to altium.com/agile/teams. That is the solution for the organization that has outgrown the Excel spreadsheet solutions. You've gotten more people, more projects, more offices, and if you feel like you're outgrowing the older, more ad hoc way of doing things, and you want things like process templates and standardized workflows, if you have the need for more user permissions because you don't know everybody that might be coming in and collaborating on a first-name basis, those types of signals that you're growing in sophistication and size, go to Agile Teams, and Agile Teams is the solution that has the 30-day free trial, and you can get into that process. And, of course, you'll be promptly contacted by one of our solution consultants who can help you get going and figure out what's in there. It's going to have Altium Designer. If you're used to Altium Designer, it's in there, but it has a lot of new things that you might not have experienced. And that's getting at the connections to Octopart and the supply chain things with BOM Portal, also Requirements Portal, managing requirements. And that's really cool. You can attach a requirement to an actual schematic, or a part of a schematic, or a layout so that the whole team can make sure that that requirement is met and verify and validate that that requirement has been met by the testing that the team does. So, really, James, we're connecting everything together with Agile Teams, and we're giving capabilities that mid-size companies used to feel were out of their reach. Now we're pricing and delivering this in a way that companies that maybe didn't think they could use these things or do these advanced capabilities will have them at their fingertips, and we'd love to talk with this audience about that. And, of course, bringing it back to Octopart, because they're part of our company, we make sure that we're providing that data connection to the Altium Agile Teams platform.

James Sweetlove: Right. Well, Justin, thank you so much. It's been really fascinating talking with you, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Justin Sears: Thank you, James. It was my pleasure. And I want to thank the audience for spending some time with us. I know it's us talking to them, but hopefully this was helpful to your audience as well.

James Sweetlove: Yeah, I think anyone who pays attention to the show will probably have some interest in what was said here. So, thank you for listening, everyone, and come back next week. We'll have another guest for you, back to the traditional format. Appreciate it.